Joanna Wane is a senior writer and amateur movie nut in the Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team.
OPINION
He could have been our first James Bond, but we’ll forgive Sir Sam (Nigel) Neill for his audition not making the cut.
Over the past 50 years, the self-described “woefully untrained actor” has made – wait for it – 94 movies, including a surprising number of horror films.
And that’s not counting dozens of TV roles, including the beastly Inspector Campbell in Peaky Blinders (a nod to his Northern Ireland roots) and the lead role in court drama The Twelve, for which he’s just been nominated for Best Lead Actor in Australia’s AACTA Awards. The show has also been confirmed for a third season.
“Few stars could boast a track record of turning in solid performances ranging from understated intensity to completely unhinged, with such consistency as actor Sam Neill,” says Rotten Tomatoes.
On the big screen, he’s played a wealthy vampire CEO (Daybreakers), an ex-communist caught in the middle of a devastating civil war (The Zookeeper), a bawdy King Charles II (Restoration), Scarlett Johansson’s dad (The Horse Whisperer), an old mate of the Pope (From A Far Country), Mr McGregor (Peter Rabbit) and the Devil’s spawn (Omen III).
You’ve probably never heard of it, but apparently his 1982 outing in Ivanhoe made him a local celebrity in Sweden, where the movie has been shown on TV on New Year’s Day ever since.
Now aged 77, Neill is in remission from blood cancer and seems busier than ever, with several projects in the pipeline.
This completely biased and unapologetically unscientific guide rates his 20 top films (and a few duds), based on quality, impact and curiosity value.
Two honourable mentions that didn’t make the final cut: Gaylene Preston’s 2003 thriller Perfect Strangers (because a colleague said she’d never forgive me if I didn’t include it and the West Coast, where it was largely filmed, is a character in itself) and the excellent documentary Cinema of Unease, Neill’s personal exploration of New Zealand’s “uniquely strange and dark film industry”. You can watch that one online at NZ on Screen.
A solid-gold tank. The third instalment in the Omen series, it cost about $5 million to make and took barely $35,000 at the box office. As Damien, the dark-haired, blue-eyed Antichrist who’s all grown up now, Neill is the devilishly good-looking CEO of an international conglomerate (give the scriptwriters some kudos for that). The Chicago Tribune was kind to Neill in his first big international role, praising his performance as the only thing the film had going for it. The shoot was a memorable one for Neill, though – he married his co-star, Lisa Harrow, the mother of his son, Tim.
Not Neill’s best film but definitively his longest. Wim Wenders’ director’s cut runs for 287 minutes. That’s nearly five hours, people! Billed as the ultimate road movie, it follows a couple (William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin) on the run from the law, in possession of a device that records dreams and makes it possible for blind people to see. Neill’s character is a bit of a wet blanket, haplessly following his former lover from one exotic location to another and finally ending up in… Coober Pedy. Truly the end of the world.
Word is there’s a TV adaptation in the works for Paul WS Anderson’s B-grade sci-fi horror about a missing spaceship that mysteriously reappears, inhabited by a sinister force. Neill is the brilliant scientist who designed the rogue ship and eventually becomes possessed by it. “You can’t leave… she won’t let you.” Talk about suffering for your art: being transformed into the monster he becomes required Neill to stand naked in makeup for eight hours each day, with a call time of 2am.
Described as “a surreal period comedic tale of canine reincarnation exploring the relationships between father and son and master and dog”, this was one of Peter O’Toole’s last films. Set in Edwardian England and directed by our own Toa Fraser, it features Neill as the eponymous Dean Spanley, an eccentric clergyman who indisputably rocks a top hat and muttonchops.
The unofficial third instalment in John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse trilogy”, following The Thing and Prince of Darkness. An exploration of insanity that pays homage to the master of cosmic horror, HP Lovecraft – and doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know – it stars Neill as an insurance investigator looking into the disappearance of a horror novelist. In one of his first scenes, he’s attacked by an axe-wielding man with mutated eyes. Things only get worse for him after that. “I’m not insane. You hear me? I’m not insane!”
One of the year’s highest-grossing releases in the US, The Hunt for Red October is probably Neill’s biggest box-office blockbuster after Jurassic Park. A shame his part is so small it doesn’t even feature in the trailer. Based on a Tom Clancy novel, the spy thriller stars Alec Baldwin as a CIA analyst who’s convinced the rogue captain of a Russian nuclear submarine (Sean Connery) is trying to defect. Neill plays his first officer. “Much credit must be given to Neill for actually attempting a Russian accent,” one fan writes. “Unlike his Scottish co-star.”
A psychological horror, co-starring legendary French actress Isabelle Adjani (seen most recently in Netflix series The Perfect Couple). Neill plays an international spy whose wife exhibits increasingly erratic behaviour – we’re talking sex with a tentacled creature and a fridge full of dismembered body parts. He’s described Possession as a “flawed masterpiece” and the most extreme film he’s ever made, saying director Andrzej Zulawski “asked of us things I wouldn’t and couldn’t go to now. I think I only just escaped that film with my sanity barely intact.” Originally banned in the United Kingdom, it’s become a cult classic, with Adjani picking up a Best Actress award at Cannes.
The incomparable Cate Blanchett plays a former heroin addict, Tracy, who’s desperately trying to escape her past. It doesn’t end well. Neill casts a sinister shadow as bisexual Sydney drug kingpin, Brad “The Jockey” Thompson, in what Time Out described as a “sober, sensitive film” with fine performances that never romanticise the characters. Co-starring Kiwi actor Martin Henderson as Tracy’s drug-dealing brother and Hugo Weaving as her drug-addicted stepfather. No wonder the poor girl never stood a chance.
Meryl Streep won an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Lindy Chamberlain, convicted of murdering her nine-week-old daughter Azaria on a camping holiday at Ayers Rock/Uluru, after claiming the baby was taken by a dingo. Neill has a far less flashy role as her bewildered pastor husband, Michael, but won Best Actor in the Australian Film Institute Awards. Renamed outside New Zealand and Australia as A Cry in the Dark, the film was released a few weeks after the Chamberlains were exonerated of all charges.
Neill plays an Asgardian actor playing Odin (Thor’s father), while the real Odin – played full ham by Anthony Hopkins – watches on. Sound confusing? It was for Neill, who did the cameo as a favour to director Taika Waititi. In a radio interview, he admitted the whole Marvel universe was a complete mystery to him. “I was standing beside [Kiwi singer] Jenny Morris and I said, ‘Do you know what planet we’re on?’ To be honest, I was completely baffled.”
One from Neill’s “grumpy old bugger” oeuvre and it’s an absolute gem. A remake of an Icelandic movie, transported to remote Western Australia, it’s a blackish comedy about two feuding brothers (Neill and The Castle’s Michael Caton) who breed prizewinning sheep. Miranda Richardson, most fondly remembered as Queenie in Blackadder, plays the local vet who’s exasperated by both of them.
This period drama by Australian director Gillian Armstrong was a big deal at the time, receiving international acclaim. About women and by women, including the producer and screenwriter, it casts Neill in a supporting role as the love interest rejected by a headstrong young woman (Judy Davis) who wants to become a writer and decides marriage would be emotionally damaging for both of them. Neill’s off-screen relationship with the notoriously difficult Davis makes for one of the rare “dish the dirt” moments in his 2023 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This? Despite co-starring in several films, the pair haven’t spoken for almost 30 years.
A quintessentially Australian comedy in the tradition of The Castle and based on actual events, The Dish tells the story of how a satellite dish on a remote sheep station played a key role in the live TV broadcast of man’s first steps on the moon. “If satellite dish porn were a thing,” wrote the Guardian, “this sentimental account would be the genre’s pièce de résistance.” Neill settles comfortably into the role of Cliff Buxton, the understated, pipe-smoking “dishmaster” at Parkes Observatory, while Roy Billing as the local mayor steals the show.
The New York Times named this psychological thriller, shot around the Great Barrier Reef, as one of the top 1000 films ever made. It’s probably most notable for Nicole Kidman’s breakthrough role as a young bereaved mother, Rae, with a wild mop of flaming-red curls that makes her almost unrecognisable today. She was 22 at the time. Neill is the third-wheel husband who’s cast adrift after the couple rescue the sole survivor (a deranged Billy Zane) from a drifting schooner and may – or may not – live to regret it.
A “meat pie Western” – the term used to describe Western-style movies set in the Australian Outback – this was Neill’s first foray into the genre. It’s also one of a handful of films in his career that overtly align with his own liberal socio-political views. Set in the late 1920s, Sweet Country tells the story of an Aboriginal farm worker who kills a landowner in self-defence and goes on the run. Neill, who plays a kindly preacher, had this to say about it: “My character is distinguished from those around him by the fact that he sees Aboriginal people as human beings”. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, winning the Special Jury Prize.
The first full-length 35mm feature film produced entirely in New Zealand, Sleeping Dogs gifted Neill his first major screen role. A political thriller based on CK Stead’s novel Smith’s Dream, it reimagines New Zealand as a police state. Viewed almost five decades on, there’s a haunting quality about it that somehow suits Neill’s slightly awkward, unpolished performance. Co-starring Ian Mune, it also marks the debut of Kiwi director Roger Donaldson, who later broke into Hollywood and still lives in LA.
One of my personal favourites. Set in a Melbourne inner-city slum suburb before the upwardly mobile moved in, this quirky masterpiece of deadpan humour may well be entirely incomprehensible beyond our Antipodean shores. Headlined by Neill in his first comic outing, the cast features the legendary John Clarke (post Fred Dagg) as a gravedigger who pulls off the film’s most outrageously funny scene. Critics on Australia’s The Movie Show called it “a black comedy which isn’t afraid to take risks, to shift moods, to push to the limit”. New Zealand singer-songwriter Phil Judd (Split Enz, The Swingers) wrote the award-winning score.
The scene where Neill’s emotionally stunted, cuckolded coloniser chops off Holly Hunter’s index finger remains viscerally shocking today. One of our most internationally celebrated films, this brooding, stunningly shot 19th-century drama picked up three Oscars – Best Actress for Hunter, Best Supporting Actress for 11-year-old Anna Paquin and Best Screenplay for director Jane Campion. Neill missed out, but critic Roger Ebert praised his performance, writing that his “taciturn husband conceals a universe of fear and sadness behind his clouded eyes”.
You get the feeling Neill is still baffled to find himself alongside Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern as the founding triumvirate of this juggernaut franchise – even though Dr Alan Grant has his own Indiana Jones-style action figure and Funko Pop bobblehead. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Jurassic Park topped the US box office in 1993, the first of six films in the series (and counting) that began with genetically engineered dinosaurs running amok in a theme park. The three stars were reunited in 2022 for Jurassic World Dominion. The less said about that, the better.
Apparently one in nine New Zealanders has seen Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Taika Waititi’s fourth film and the best bromance in the history of Aotearoa cinema. The chemistry between Neill’s cantankerous ex-con Hec and his foster son Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) when they go bush is almost enough to compensate for Rima Te Wiata’s premature demise as Hec’s wife. Almost. Holding the record for the highest-grossing NZ film (ahead of Boy), it’s rated 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. “Pretty majestical, aye?”
When you’ve been in as many movies as Neill, there are bound to be a few duds. Here are three of the most widely panned.
Principally bankrolled by Fifa and released at the height of its corruption scandal, United Passions was roasted as propaganda and bombed at the box office, losing a reported $26.8 million. Neill plays FIFA president Joao Havelange, a Brazilian lawyer and former athlete who eventually hands the reins to Sepp Blatter (Tim Roth). The New York Times called this “one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory”. It has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Based on an Isaac Asimov story, with Robin Williams as an android who wants to become human and Sam Neill as his sympathetic master, this must have looked good on paper. According to critic Roger Ebert, it’s let down by a bad script, beginning with promise before finally sinking into a “cornball drone of greeting-card sentiment”.
A rom-com starring Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams, dismissed as maudlin, soulless and formulaic. The ultimate insult: “This is for young women what Transformers is for young men.” Neill’s performance, as McAdams’ wealthy father, was largely ignored.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning feature writer on the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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